Posts tagged Abstract Reviews

Changes

This year we decided to try something new and allow any PASS member input into the Summit session selections. Hopefully it will provide good info for the session reviewers to use. They always have a very tough job choosing sessions since there are so many good choices. For instance the DBA review team will have looked over 200 different abstracts when they are done! I hope that the preference results will give them a little more info when deciding between 2 equally good sessions.

Preconference seminars

Dont forget to let us know specifically which precons you’d like to see, these results are going to be used more stringently than the regular sessions so the more results we can get the better!

Hurry

Use of the tool ends today so hurry and log in to the Preferencing site and chose as many sessions as you’d like. There is no limit but, beware choosing too many isn’t exactly helping the situation 🙂

Ill put out an update once the selections are over on how helpful the preferencing info turned out to be.

PASS Summit 2011 Preconference Session selection info

The other day I detailed as much info as I could about changes to this years session selection processes. The call for ALL Sessions at the Summit is officially open until May 5, 2011 that means we’re accepting abstracts for regular sessions as well as for the Preconference sessions.

Competition

For many of the more experienced speakers in the SQL Community the opportunity to give a full day highly technical session at the summit is attractive. Not only do they get to showcase their technical skills, they also get to showcase their own unique training style. Additionally, the pay isnt half bad either. Of course, most of these speakers will tell you that based on the amount of time needed to generate an all day session the pay is actually half bad, not half good 🙂

Requirements Change

For the past 3 years we’ve had a set of requirements in place that qualify speakers to present a preconference session, those requirements are looked at every year by a set of volunteers to make sure they are still valid and usually only minor adjustments are made. This year however I made a larger adjustment. In order to clarify the requirement that giving a precon requires you to also give a spotlight session, I added #11 to the list of criteria you should meet to deliver a precon. Since that is a gimme criteria, I bumped the total criteria needed to meet from 4 to 5

Improvements

After you’ve done your thing and submitted a terrific abstract for a precon session its up to us to try and be fair in the selection process for these sessions. Over the last few years we have tried many things to both open up the selection process and to open up submissions to a competitive process. There have been many ups and downs in this iterative process. Sometimes we do well, and sometimes… not so much. The point is that we’re always trying to produce a better process. I’m excited that hopefully this year we’ve ironed out a few more of the wrinkles we exposed last year.

Process Part one

After the Call for abstracts closes we are going to release a “preferencer” tool that we’re going to use to allow PASS Members the ability to communicate what their favorite sessions are. We’re going to use the data gathered from this tool to assist us in making the session selections. Additionally, we are tentatively going to use this same info to prepopulate your attendee schedule builder after the selections are made. I’d like to think we’ll be able to use the data from this tool in a 1-1 fashion where we take the top X precons per track and build the session schedule that way. In reality though, I expect we’re going to find several overlapping session subjects at the top of the list. I’m thinking things like 3 “indexing sessions” in the top 5 for the DBA track, or 2 Sessions from a single speaker for instance. We’ll need a a team to help make those decisions.

Introducing the team that will make the decisions

Lori Edwards PASS Junkie, blogger, and all around pain in the … – I kid, Lori has been picking up all of the slack in the PASS Program committee, as well as participating in the PASS ERC

Me – Yeah, Im going to have a seat at the table this year. I havent participated in an actual abstract selection team in a couple of years so this should be a fun diversion.

In building this small team, I’m expecting that there wont be a heck of a lot of “work” to do. I’m really expecting that we will be able to rely mainly on the members preferences but I wanted to have insurance in case there was more to the selection than simply relying on preferences.

The multiple similar session problem

In the past one dilemma that Ive been looking for creative ways to solve goes something like this.

“If I specialize in Architecture for SQL Flux capacitors and Veteran speaker XYZ always presents a precon on SQL flux capacitor architecture how will I ever get chosen for a precon”

This year, I’m hoping that with the membership showing which sessions they’d like to see if a particular topic has an apparent huge interest, we can potentially give 2 precons on a similar topic (1 on Monday, and 1 on Tuesday). The way the tool is being built, we should get good data about which precons a group of people would most like to see. I dont know if this will work or not but, its a small enough risk that I cant see why we wouldnt at least try to see what the data tells us.

After thinking about the data this tool should generate, I wonder where I can find a good data analysis person to volunteer and tell me what it means. Maybe I should ask someone in the community for help with that before mucking it up myself *hint*

This week we’ll be launching the call for abstracts for the 2011 PASS Summit.

I thought it would be good to go over the basics for this year especially since some things are changing from years past. Many of the changes are minor, some are behind the scenes so to speak, and a small amount are larger and more public facing.

A New Site

PASS HQ and the Program Committee team has been diligently working to bring the summit speaker/education management programming inhouse. With this effort comes a new site for abstract submissions. We hope this new site will make the abstract submission process easier and more relevant to collecting the info PASS needs in order to facilitate session selections.

A New Process

One of the largest changes on the backend process this year is going to be seperating the speaker review from the abstract review piece of the selection process. Essentially, this year we have two seperate teams to do each task. This came about from the comments of previous review team members as well as the need to offload some of the work the call generates for the larger teams. Im hopeful that this change will help bring a little more stability to the scores each team gives an abstract as well as cut some of the subjectiveness (likely only a tiny bit)

A New Session Type

I wrote previously about having 1/2 day sessions at the Summit and they are still planned. Now you know where to bring your best and brightest content! In case your thinking what it would be like to have your 1/2 day session recorded, Ive got great news. Ive got a tentative compromise devised. This year we will be distributing two seperate DVD sets, 1 for attendees of the Summit which will have every session. Another for non attendees that will have all of the regular sessions excluding the deep dive 1/2 day sessions.

Spotlight Sessions & Invitations

Thanks to some great feedback last year The formula that we used for spotlight selections was adjusted and looks like this: We will invite all speakers who recieved an overall evaluation of 4.5 or greater and had at least 15 attendees and 15 completed evaluations. We will be excluding Lightning talks, Chalk Talks, and Microsoft speakers. This year that leaves us with a whopping total of 27 people getting spotlight invites. These speakers are truly spectacular, and they deserve the extra recognition/time for their sessions. All abstracts submitted as spotlight will be considered not only for a spotlight slot but, will also be considered for a regular session if they dont get picked for a spotlight session.

Preconference Changes

I would be remiss to not mention this here but, some different things (changes!!) are planned for this year, as soon as I get a chance to finalize them a bit more I will write about it, hopefully in the next few days to a week.

Abstract Limits

We have decided to change the limits on abstract submissions a bit for this year. We will be encouraging you to submit up to 4 total : Regular, 1/2 day and Spotlight (if invited) Sessions. In addition if you meet the qualifications you can submit up to 2 Preconference sessions. On top of this each person can submit 1 panel (discussion type) session for consideration. In order to do this each speaker in your panel will need to have speaker details entered so we can rate the session properly. This in itself is a pretty good sized change so get creative and see what the selection teams think!

But when

I can hear you asking from here… “All of thats great but, when will the call for abstracts for the 2011 PASS Summit open?” I have great news.

Today is the last chance if you wanted to lend a hand to the 2011 PASS Program Committee. I wrote about all the gory details two weeks ago here. If your interested please get the survey filled out today before 9PM PST. You might as well do it now though, no sense in putting it off until the last minute!

Help wanted Needed!!

This year my portfolio within the PASS board is “Summit program and speaker management” Ive been involved with this portfolio for at least the last 4 years. This year, I’m going to be transitioning into yet a different roll within the committee. Ill still be heavily involved but, I’m turning the majority of the day to day decision making over to Lori Edwards (Blog|Twitter) She was hugely involved last year, and I have no doubt she will work her magic again this year!

Program Committee Changes

This year, there are going to be some changes to the processes in the program committee, Ill detail some of those in a later set of blog posts. For now, Ive decided to split up the groups of volunteers in the program committee to hopefully enable some of the future process changes.

Help Wanted

For this year we’re going to need help in many areas

Abstract Review Teams (led by Lori Edwards)

DBA/Cloud/BI/AD/PD

Speaker Review Team (led by Tim Ford)

This group will review speakers independently of their abstracts

Speaker Enhancement team (Wes Brown & Grant Fritchey)

This will probably stay a small group and work on updating sample abstracts, selection info, generating info for new speakers etc.

PPT/Abstract Editing review/approval (Led by Tim Martin)

This group will be working on sessions after they are accepted (lots of new ideas here)

Special Projects (Led by AJ Mendo & Lance Harra)

This group will be working on finishing the Speaker Evaluation tool, coordinating changes to the Summit online tool as well as a few other projects that are envisioned.

Cutting edge

Its been said that what we do in the Program committee is on the bleeding edge of what PASS does in organizing groups of volunteers at the national level. That is to say, we need lots of help but, sometimes things dont always work out quite how we (I) had expected. I say this only to set expectations that its not always a smooth ride but, rarely is it not interesting.

We developed an online survey to help us capture all of the relevant info about everyone who wants to volunteer. Don’t worry, its not a job app and it shouldn’t be resume quality, we’re primarily looking for general information